


Aurora

by anr



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-02
Updated: 2006-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-18 10:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/pseuds/anr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We've crash landed on an alien planet during a solar storm. What's to like?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aurora

**Author's Note:**

> Betas: hannasus and mandysbitch
> 
> Request: anything, so long as it's apocalyptic.

They land badly.

"Okay," he says slowly, staring at the control panel beneath his face plate, " _that_ was fun."

He hears a groan over the comm, and then a short huff. "Fun my ass, Apollo -- that was downright insane."

"Well, you would know." Cautiously, he pushes himself back into a sitting position. "What's our sitrep?"

"Frakked?"

He rolls his eyes. "Be specific."

"We crashed."

" _Starbuck_..."

"Okay, okay. Environmentals are stable -- hull pressure normal. No breaches."

"Any idea where we are?"

"Nav's still out. Re-routing now."

There's a sharp crack, and he looks over his shoulder just in time to see Kara throw herself to the deck as a waterfall of sparks drench the back wall of the raptor.

_Frak_.

  


* * *

  


While Lee conducts a basic scout of the surrounding area, Kara performs a damage assessment.

"How bad is it?"

He watches Kara wriggle out from the under the ECO console and move into a sitting position. "Bad," she answers. She yanks hard on a bouquet of wiring until it pulls free, and holds it up for him to take. "Whole panel's fried."

He examines the wiring in his hand, the melted plastic coverings dusted with a thin layer of soot. "Can we fix it?"

She closes her eyes, and drops her head back onto the bulkhead behind her with a dull thud. "Maybe," she says eventually, opening her eyes. "If we had the right tools, and a spare circuit board or two."

He winces. "What about a bypass?"

"The entire ECM platform?" He nods. "Sure... but we'd be totally blind, and with zero offensive and defensive capabilities."

"But we'd still be flying, right?"

"Without the ECM, yeah." She pushes herself to her feet. "Without the sublight engines, no."

Lee holds back a frustrated groan. "What's wrong with the sublight engines?"

"Fuel. Or, rather, a lack of it." She hands him a scrap of paper, the figures on it hurriedly scribbled and almost illegible. "The thrusters went into overtime trying to control our descent and trajectory -- burnt through most of it."

"That's impossible." He thinks back over those final moments as they came in, trying hard to remember something more than the lurching of the raptor as he struggled to bring it back under his control. The jaw-breaking ride through the atmosphere had probably taken a couple of minutes, four at the most. Not nearly long enough for them to have used that much tylium.

Kara shrugs. "Feel free to check the levels yourself. I've a stogie back on _Galactica_ with your name on it if you can get them to say something different." She brushes a swatch of hair off her cheek. "What's the outside like?"

"We're in a field of some kind -- wheat, I think. There's a treeline off to the west, and a mountain range to the south, but that's about it. Weather's temperate -- clear skies."

Kara nods at his descriptions. "So," she summarises, "frakked?"

"Pretty much, yeah." They're in the open, highly visible, and their nearest cover -- the treeline -- is at least a kilometre away.

"How long you think until _Galactica_ gets here?"

He looks at his chronometer and counts it off in his head. "We're expected to make contact in about three hours, so..."

"Lords." She starts to pace, mumbling as she does. "It'll be two hours easy after that before they start worrying... and another hour before they start moving..."

He nods, and finishes the thread. "Then two jumps to get here and start searching. They know we came here to survey this planet -- it's the only one that reads as inhabitable in the system anyway -- so it shouldn't take too long after that."

"I don't know, it's a big ass planet." Kara runs another hand through her hair, this time leaving a smudge of soot on her cheek. "Unless they start right on top of us, it'll take them hours to locate our emergency beacon under all that solar crap upstairs."

He wants to say something positive in response, something inane and cheerful about how it won't take _that_ long, but only cliches come to mind. He looks down at the burnt out wiring in his left hand, the scrap of fuel figures in his right.

Kara walks away.

  


* * *

  


They have seven hours to kill, probably longer, so they trade locations for a while. Kara checks out the area and Lee remains inside, examining the raptor. He finds nothing that could win him a stogie, and can only hope she's having better luck.

When he heads outside, he finds her sitting on the starboard wing, her face upturned to the sky. It's well into twilight already -- absently, he wonders how long the nights last here.

"Busy?" he asks sarcastically.

She points upwards. "Check it out."

He does.

Green and blue and violet with just a trace of red... the coloured rays of light bend and twist and arc across the sky, constantly moving as the last traces of the sun disappear and the stars begin to shine through. It's beautiful.

"The solar storm," he says unnecessarily, and she hums an agreement.

He leans against the wing, his shoulder near her feet, and watches it with her, this reason as to why they descended into the atmosphere in the first place. If it hadn't been for all the solar activity screwing up their systems as soon as they jumped here, they would have never lost power and been caught in the planet's gravity. They would have simply mapped this rock from a low orbit and gone home again without ever scratching the dirt.

He checks the time. Three hours down, at least four to go. He should probably check the emergency beacon again. "You hungry?"

"Nah." She shifts a little and her ankle presses against his shoulder. "You?"

He had thought he was. "I'm good."

  


* * *

  


The wheat comes up to his waist and brushes against his palms as he walks a slow perimeter around the raptor. Dry and golden, the stalks break easily, seeds scattering across the dirt. When he cups his hand around one of the heads and then drags it free again, he's left with a palm full of small brown kernels.

"You know, Helo'll never let us live this down." Kara's still on the raptor wing, studying the sky, and her voice carries easily in the silence.

"I know." He fingers the seeds in his hand, absently counting them. The solar storm raging above their heads provides enough illumination for him to focus.

"He'll make jokes about how viper pilots don't know how to fly worth a damn. He'll say that, as a Battlestar commander and CAG, we should have done better than to crash land during a simple survey mission. He'll say this only proves his point about raptor pilots being the real backbone of the fleet."

He's reminded, suddenly, of a summer long, long ago, when he and Zak played hide-and-seek on their grandfather's farm on Picon. "Sounds like Helo's going to be saying a lot."

"Yeah, well. Boy has a big mouth -- never does know when to keep it shut."

Harvest had been late that year, the fields still mostly green when he and Zak arrived. Lee remembers his grandfather yelling at them, on and off over the next month, for playing in the fields, for breaking too many stalks. "Reminds me of someone else I know."

"Hey. Easy, Apollo -- no need to beat yourself up. You've gotten much better at keeping quiet over the years." He can hear her grinning.

"Funny." That was the summer his parents divorced, the summer he realised his childhood was over...

"I thought so."

... and that his world was never going to be the same again.

Dusting his palms, he heads back over to the raptor.

  


* * *

  


"Time's up."

He tilts his head back in an attempt to see her. She's standing on the top of the raptor, binoculars in hand, while he reclines on the wing and watches the storm. "The chances of us seeing them FTL into this system from _here_ are remote to say the least."

"I know."

He watches her raise the binoculars to her eyes and scan the horizon. "As are the chances that their search would begin where we went down. They're far more likely to start searching where it's daylight."

"I know."

"Unless of course they screw up the plot like we did and jump straight into the storm... but even then, the chances of them crashing in exactly the same place as us are --"

"By the Gods, Apollo," she snaps. "I _know_."

His neck is getting sore from staring up at her. He relaxes back into his original position. "Then what are you looking for?"

"Not for," she says, " _at_. There's like a glow or something in the sky above those mountains."

He sits up abruptly, and gingerly moves so that he's standing beside her. There's not much room and he has to hold onto her shoulder as she passes him the binoculars.

"There," she says, "see it?"

He's expecting a bright splash of light, not a barely noticeable smudge on the underside of the clouds hanging above the range. "It's a bright night, Starbuck," he says. "A little reflective glare is to be expected."

"Yeah, but reflected from what?"

He shrugs, and hands back the binoculars. "The storm?"

"Storm's to the north. Those peaks are to the south."

"The moon? The sun? Maybe there's a lake over there and it's throwing up a reflection. I don't know."

"The sun set in the west, which means it'll rise from the east. And the moon's right above us."

"That doesn't mean the light is restricted to directly above our heads," he points out logically. When she crosses her arms, he sighs. "Okay, okay. So what do _you_ think it's from?"

"I don't know," she admits, shrugging. "But I don't like it."

He rolls his eyes and turns away, stepping back down onto the wing. "We've crash landed on an alien planet during a solar storm. What's to like?"

  


* * *

  


"So, what do you think?"

"Water?" She shakes her head, and he caps the bottle, resting it on the edge of the console. "What do I think of what?"

"This planet."

"What about it?" On his console, the diagnostic he's running finishes and throws up a green light. He nods. "Try it now."

Kara flicks the main switch. When nothing immediately sparks or shorts, she starts turning on the individual systems one by one. "You know," she says, a little impatiently. "Do you think it's Earth?"

_Honestly?_ "I don't know." He queues up another diagnostic. They've decided to bypass the ECM after all. It's not like they've anything better to do. "Wouldn't be my first choice."

He can hear Kara moving around behind him, no doubt pushing herself out from underneath the ECO console again. He leans back in his chair and watches the figures crawl across his screens.

"The system is kinda pathetic, isn't it? Nine planets, and not a trace of tylium on any of them."

"Don't forget the fact that only one of the planets is capable of sustaining human life."

"Hmm." She brushes past him and drops into the co-pilots chair, neatly snagging his protein bar on her way.

"Hey!"

She grins unrepentantly, and lifts up her legs, resting her feet on the edge of the console. He rescues his water bottle moments before it would have been knocked to the ground. When he glares at her, she waves his expression aside with a flippant hand gesture.

"You know, Tyrol's giving a hundred and ninety-three to one odds that it _is_ Earth this time. Or, at least, he was when we left _Galactica_."

"Yeah?" He narrows his eyes. "What'd you bet?"

"Ha!" She scoffs. "With those odds? What makes you think I'd bet anything?"

"Because you're _you_."

She laughs. "Tube of toothpaste," she admits.

He almost laughs as well... until he remembers one very important fact. "Hey! You don't _have_ any toothpaste." She's been using his ever since they came across the comet that led them to this system.

"Oh, relax, Apollo. I'm sure this'll be fifth time lucky."

"Considering the fact that I'm still paying off your _last_ Earth loss," he says, just as his diagnostic finishes, "you'll forgive me if I'm not so optimistic." He leans forward to study the results, pushing her feet off the console as he does so.

She shrugs. "Hey, I was sure that rock was the thirteenth colony. All it needed was a glimpse of the Lagoon Nebula in the night sky."

"An ozone layer would have been nice too."

She shrugs, and props her feet up on the edge of his chair instead. "You're too picky."

He hides a smile. "One of us has to be."

  


* * *

  


"Sun's coming up."

He looks up from the figures he's studying to find Kara at the main hatch, staring up at the sky. "Yeah?" He glances out the canopy to see for himself.

"'Bout damn time, too. I was beginning to think the nights on this rock went forever."

He knows what she means -- they've been stuck here for twelve hours now, over eight of them in darkness.

A shot of light suddenly arcs through the sky, cutting through the solar storm.

"Wow -- did you see that?!"

He nods, and points as an encore occurs. "There's another one."

They stare as the lights descend into the horizon. "Shooting stars?" muses Kara.

"Maybe," he says, but even as he says it, his answer doesn't feel right. He thinks of the way those lights shot across the sky, travelling from one horizon to another, tails blazing through the atmosphere...

A faint hum teases his hearing. He looks back at Kara just as she looks at him; he's on his feet a half-second later.

"Finally!" says Kara, as he pushes past her and exits the raptor.

He circles the craft quickly, stepping up onto the wing once more. When he's standing on the top, he raises the binoculars to his eyes and scans the horizons.

"Can you see them?" she asks, looking up at him from the ground.

He shakes his head. "Still too dark." The sky continues to lighten, however, as he searches. To the north the solar storm lights are already fading, their colours bleeding into the brightening sky.

Above their heads, three more stars shoot across the sky.

He turns towards the east just as the sun breaks the horizon, the fields of wheat shimmering silver, and then gold. He swings to the south and freezes.

"What is it? What do you see?"

He zooms in as best he can. "Three... maybe four crafts."

"Ours?"

They're not vipers, he knows that for certain. They're slower, _bigger_. Raptors maybe? Sunlight glints off their edges, highlighting size but not design. "Starbuck --" He drops the binoculars to tell her to get their stuff, only to find her already gone. A moment later, his pack flies out of the raptor, hers quickly following.

He brings the binoculars up again and focuses on the approaching craft. As more sun spills across the land, he starts to pick out identifying features.

He swings to the west, their best possible escape route, only to find two more craft breaking over the treetops. It's a similar scene to the east and north.

He jumps down from the raptor just as Kara exits it. "Heavy Raiders," he says. He ignores the packs on the ground and reaches for his sidearm. The weight is solid, comforting.

" _Frak_ ," mutters Kara, as she grabs her own weapon. "How the frak did they frakking find us?!"

"Don't know." He readies his piece and thumbs off the safety, hearing an echoing click from her direction a split-second later.

It doesn't take long after that, and they watch as the nearest of the Heavy Raiders circle above their heads briefly before landing.

"You know," says Kara, bringing up her weapon as a handful of Centurions begin marching their way, "this isn't what I was expecting."

"I don't know," he says, "seems pretty familiar to me." After all, every other 'Earth' they've found so far has been wrong, why not this one too?

He glances away from the nearing ships as more stars shoot across the sky. And not just one or two or three -- no, now there are dozens, _hundreds_ , of them: flares of white and orange, pink and red and yellow, streaking through the atmosphere with uneven choreography before burning up on the eastern horizon. And they're _not_ stars, he realises. Not even close. He feels ill suddenly. He's _seen_ this before.

Everybody he knows has.

"Apollo."

The _Titania_ was to have been Aerelon's greatest triumph in commercial interstellar travel, a luxury liner the likes of which had never been seen before. It was the largest and most extravagant civilian vessel ever constructed, and had taken over five years to complete.

"Apollo."

On its maiden voyage, a tour of the Twelve Colonies, the _Titania_ had -- for reasons no one could fathom, though there were theories -- jumped the final leg of its journey and, upon entering Caprica's orbit, collided with a civilian freighter.

"Apollo."

The damage to both ships had been devastating, the fractured vessels quickly sinking into the planet's atmosphere and raining debris over Caprica City for hours after the collision. Every news station on every colony had shown footage of it -- Lee remembers watching with Zak and Kara in her apartment, the three of them unable to look away for even a moment.

" _Lee_."

He thinks of his friends, his _father_...

He looks away. "Yeah," he says, "I know."

The cylons have surrounded them, the cropped circle their raptor originally made when it landed rapidly extending as the Centurions trample paths from their Heavy Raiders. Behind the Centurions, humanoid versions approach, weaving through the toasters. Lee counts all twelve models, probably half a dozen of each. His finger twitches against the trigger.

"By the Gods," he says. It's not an exclamation.

Kara nods. "So say we all."

_Twelve._

"Welcome," says one of the Two's, smiling broadly, "and a thousand felicitations to you."

"You found us," says one of the Leoben's to Kara, "just like I always knew you would."

Kara spits at his feet. "Frak you."

_Eleven._

A Boomer smiles at him. "We've waited so long for this moment," she says.

He glares at her. "I'm sure you have." He thinks of the debris above their heads. "It's not every day you get to exterminate the last of humanity."

_Ten._

"An unfortunate occurrence," says a Six. "We were merely defending ourselves."

One of the Biers crosses her arms. "Your fleet fired on our welcoming committee _first_."

A Cavil shakes his head, as though disappointed. "A tragic misunderstanding, no doubt."

_Nine._

"How'd you even get here?" Kara asks. "We kicked your asses to the other side of the Aella Nebula months ago -- there's no way you could have made it to this system before us."

A Simon smiles. "We've always been here."

_Eight._

"What do you mean?" asks Lee, fingers tightening around his sidearm.

A Nine spreads his arms out, gesturing broadly. "This is our world."

"Our refuge," says a Twelve.

"This is where our brethren came, after the armistice was signed," says a Six.

_Seven._

_Like frak_ , thinks Lee. "The Cylon homeworld is located just outside the Cyrannus system."

"A viewpoint only," says a Doral dismissively. "This is our true home."

"They welcomed us here," says a Four earnestly. "Took us in with open arms, sheltered us, showed us the way of God."

"They helped us evolve into His image," adds a One.

"Amen," says a Cavil.

"They?" asks Kara. "They who?"

The Biers closest to Lee smiles. "Why, the people of Earth, of course."

_Six._

He's reminded suddenly of the last time the worlds ended, of Kara's confession in the hanger bay and the way her words had stuck in his gut, like a red hot poker and a blast of icy vacuum all rolled up into one. And he feels that now, as the cylons smile at them, their claim that this is Earth, the home of the Thirteenth Colony and of _them_ , echoing in his ears.

_Five._

"I don't believe you," says Kara.

A Leoben smiles. "You will."

_Four._

He moves on instinct, angling closer, his right arm raising until his gun caresses her cheek and then temple; feels the muzzle of Kara's weapon drag up his chest until it's positioned over his heart.

The cylons react negatively, demanding that they lower their weapons. He ignores them, but Kara glances their way.

"I hope you all frakking rust in hell." She looks back at Lee and nods. "We're done."

As far as last words go, he's heard a hell of a lot worse. He nods back.

_Three._

Then the circle of cylons tightens around them, and he thinks, _frak it -- I can do better than that_. He owes her a confession anyway.

_Two._

"Hey, Kara --" He smiles, just for her. "I was never going to take it back."

She grins. "Good."

_One._

  


* * *

The End

**Author's Note:**

> ORIGINAL URL: <http://anr.livejournal.com/245100.html>


End file.
